A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks
A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks
List: $22.50 | Sale: $15.75
Club: $11.25

A Week in December

Author: Sebastian Faulks

Narrator: Simon Vance

Unabridged: 12 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/02/2010


Synopsis

From the author of the bestselling Birdsong comes a powerful novel that melds the moral heft of Dickens and the scrupulous realism of Trollope with the satirical spirit of Tom Wolfe.

London: the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on reality TV and genetically altered pot; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

With daring skill and savage humor, A Week in December explores the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life; as the novel moves to its gripping climax, its characters are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they—and we all—inhabit.

About The Author

Sebastian Faulks is the author of seven previous novels, including Birdsong (1993), The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989), Charlotte Gray (1998), On Green Dolphin Street (2001) and Human Traces (2005). He is also the author of a biographical study, The Fatal Englishman (1996).


Reviews

Goodreads review by Baba on June 25, 2023

Faulks produces a wonderful ensemble cast in this story of seven days (the week before Christmas) in the lives of slightly connected people living in and around London in 2007; a hedge fund manager and his Skunk addicted son; a new Polish Premiership footballer; self made Muslim businessman, his wif......more

Goodreads review by Ruby on August 25, 2011

This book left me wondering why SF had failed to write a great novel and has me running to my bookshelf to compare his French trilogy and Human Traces. About halfway through A Week in December, a peripheral character (Shahla) spoke and her voice sounded like the first real person in the book. The ot......more

Goodreads review by Ian on July 09, 2010

I think this may well have been the first Faulks novel set in modern day that I have read - having gone through the wars, victorian mental health and the 1970s - we now have a state of the nation book. And what a clever book it is. A the title suggests, spread over 1 week, this details the lives of a......more

Goodreads review by Huw on January 16, 2011

Not everybody likes this book. But that's probably because they don't get it. We ought to know by now that Sebastian Faulks' books don't conform to any norm - each one is a finely etched little etching etched onto an etching - and each one is entirely original in every way. In "A Week in December" Fau......more

Goodreads review by Deb on December 29, 2012

I picked this book up in an airport desperate for a book for a long plane ride. I had no expectations but a lot of hope because it got glowing reviews on its cover - but sometimes those are misleading. But I was riveted from beginning to end. The end is slightly on the abrupt side - it's a surprise......more


Quotes

“The novel is unequivocally successful [as a] narrative . . . Readers will race through the pages like banks through cash.” —The Guardian


Kirkus Reviews, STARRED
Faulks, Sebastian
A WEEK IN DECEMBER
 
Two plots—one financial, the other terrorist—are being hatched, but there’s much more going on in this absorbing big-canvas view of contemporary London from Faulks (Engleby, 2007, etc.).

John Veals, a middle-aged hedge fund manager and the coldest of cold fish, is planning the collapse of a major British bank. His goal? To pump even more billions of dollars into his fund. Hassan al-Rashid, a young Muslim raised in Scotland, belongs to a jihadist cell. By chance, their schemes will climax simultaneously in December 2007. Faulks uses the tried-and-true countdown device as a backbeat. In the foreground is lucid if rather too lengthy exposition. To explain Veals’s strategy, Faulks leads us through the labyrinth of puts, calls, trades and more, while for Hassan he limns a credible step-by-step recruitment process. As a counterweight to the blandishments of the Koran, Faulks offers the reader the rational humanism of Gabriel Northwood, an impoverished barrister; the strident voice of the Koran reminds Gabriel uncomfortably of the voices plaguing his schizophrenic brother Adam. Gabriel’s somber hospital visits are a corrective to a shockingly cruel, hugely lucrative reality show that pillories the participants, all crazies. (Veals’s teenage son, a fan of the show, will join Adam after a drug-induced psychotic episode.) The light in Gabriel’s sad life is a new client, Jenni Fortune, the mixed-race driver of a subway train and devotee of video games. Unlike digital seductions (another Faulks theme), the love that grows between Gabriel and Jenni is piercingly real. For light relief, there’s Hassan’s wealthy businessman father, panicked before an audience with the Queen, soliciting advice on Great Books from an embittered reviewer, a veteran of the literary racket. Remarkably, Faulks retains control of his material as he shows us a world in which money rules, tunnel vision destroys and love remains the touchstone and redeemer.
With its inexhaustible curiosity about the way the world works, this funny, exciting work is another milestone in a distinguished career.


The Chicago Tribune 
2/28/10

A WEEK IN DECEMBER "include[s] beautifully written riffs on how money really works... [it] is vigorous, authentic and often hilarious. The novel follows a hedge fund manager, a book critic, a subway ("tube" in British parlance) driver and a student who falls under the lethal spell of Islamic fundamentalism, among many others, but it is the hedge fund manager who resonates most. He is smart, ruthless, single-minded — and fascinating, in the way a shark or a serial killer can be fascinating: 'Somewhere in the passageways of John Veals' mind,' Faulks writes, 'beyond the thoughts of wife, children, daily living, carnal urges … there was a creature whose heart beat only to market movements.' ... Faulks [has] set a formidable standard ... clever and convincing, [it reminds] us that fiction always has the final word."


The L.A. Times
3/31/10

"The English writer Sebastian Faulks is one of those curious novelists whose predilection for well-told stories and popularity with readers often have seemed impediments to serious regard.

That's a bit unfair because, with its knowing nods to Trollope, Dickens and Tom Wolfe, A WEEK IN DECEMBER -- his ninth work of full-length fiction -- is a formally ambitious, intelligently entertaining, rather provocative novel ... [Faulks] has a reporter's keen eye for telling details and a propulsive mastery of narrative."